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Look! Up in the Sky! It’s an Astronomical Price for a Comic Book!

ComicConnect.comA copy of Action Comics No. 1 that sold for more than $2 million.

An auction for a copy of Action Comics No. 1 from 1938 set a record Wednesday night. After 50 bids the closing price was $2,161,000 — the most ever paid for a comic book — to be the owner of the first appearance of Superman. (And that new owner’s identity is currently secret.) The copy of the book was graded at 9.0 on a scale of 1 to 10, a full grade better than a copy of Action Comics No. 1 that sold for $1 million last year. (For a look at other notable debuts, and what they have fetched, click here.)

The saga of this copy of Action Comics no. 1 is worthy of its own graphic novel. Various reports have indicated that this copy was once owned by Nicolas Cage and was stolen from his home in 2000. Mr. Cage bought the comic in 1997 for $150,000. In April, Stephen Fishler, the co-owner of ComicConnect.com and Metropolis Collectibles, was contacted by a man who had purchased the contents of a storage locker in California. Inside was the copy of Action Comics No. 1. “After spending so many years looking for the book, I was blown away when it appeared,” Mr. Fishler said in a statement. “The book’s new owner and the whole collectibles community are lucky this amazing book was recovered.”